Ola Majekodunmi was just seven months old when her Nigerian parents sought asylum in Ireland but she attended an Irish-language school and now presents her own Irish radio show.

Immigrants to Ireland are becoming a part of the next generation of Irish speakers. iStock

Ola Majekodunmi is a fluent Irish speaker after her Nigerian parents sent her to an Irish-medium school

Irish student Ola Majekodunmi was just seven months old when her Nigerian parents sought asylum in Ireland, leaving their four older children in Lagos.

Yet when a flyer for their local Irish-medium school (referred to in Ireland as a Gaelscoil) Gaelscoil Lios na nÓg came under their door, they thought it was worth a shot.

Majekodunmi got on well in the Dublin school and she decided to continue her Irish-medium education with her classmates at Coláiste Íosagáin, despite it sometimes being tough for her parents to help her with her homework.

“The passion for the language really came to me in fifth and sixth year, particularly after I studied Fill Arís by Sean ó Ríordáin. I found that poem very, very passionate,” she told the Irish Times, adding that it helped her to see parallels between the attitudes her own mother tongue would have faced as a British colony.

“It still surprises people that a person of color would speak Irish,” Majekodunmi added.

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